As of two days ago, the tally of murdered Palestinians stood at 36,671 people.
14,031 children have been brutally killed by Israeli forces in 130 days of slaughter funded, armed, and supported every step of the way by America and its coalition of allies, which includes Australia.
There is an overwhelming amount of information, and horror, to parse through—on a daily basis. I’m not going to try to cover it all, I can’t, I’m here today to respond to the racist ramblings of a literary reviews editor and Prime Minister’s Literary Award judge, Caroline Overington, who wrote a disgusting, disingenuous screed in today’s The Weekend Australian. If you haven’t imbibed enough Zionist bile yet, you can read it here. Overington takes issue with what she’s dubbed a “frothingly anti-Israel” line-up at the 2024 Adelaide Writers Week, which is directed by Louise Adler, an anti-Zionist Jewish publisher. Adler has been a frequent target of conservatives and Zionists in Australia, particularly since she featured Palestinian authors at a previous iteration of the festival. In her article, Overington asks “where is the balance?” in this, and other programs she dubs “anti-Israel”.
How do you balance apartheid and genocide? How do you, with a straight face, call for the platforming of the viewpoint that the slaughter of over 36,000 people—the majority of whom are women and children, the overwhelming majority of whom are civilians (92%)—is okay? She quite explicitly calls for that. The “anti-Israel” writers and speakers she cites include renowned Israeli historians Illan Pappé and Avi Shlaim so it’s clear that Israeli viewpoints are not sufficient, no, what’s called for is a Zionist viewpoint that is not critical of Israel. There’s no mention of either Illan or Avi’s identity, nor their credentials, in the same way that Adler’s own Jewish perspective is entirely elided - to do so would rather puncture the racist steam she’s running on and attempting to foster in others.
In order to assess Overington’s disturbingly irrational claim as to what can be called “hatred”, it’s important to note who the people she has singled out are, beyond their apparently unbearable opinions on the issue of Israel’s systematic murder of Palestinians, which has been ruled by the International Court of Justice as plausibly constituting the gravest crime against humanity, which is genocide. For example, Ben Saul is the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism, and Nathan Thrall is a Jewish American author and essayist based in Jerusalem who has a new book out. I challenge you to find anything any of these authors/speakers have said or written that constitutes “hatred” and indeed, if I were any of the individuals named, I would demand a retraction of this grotesque description of opposition to the starvation and displacement of 2 million people as well as the systematic slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians who have been subjected to an apartheid system for decades.
I’m going to go through this article at length, not just because of the prominence of this individual in my industry, but because it marks a shift from the norm for conservatives. This is not identity politics, calling for a Jewish or Israeli perspective to “balance” out a Palestinian’s view (which would be racist in itself, suggesting that either hypothetical individual is unable to present their opinion alone), it’s pure politics, calling for the articulation of a political position that matches her own. The deliberate obfuscation of the identities of the authors, in fact, can be attributed to the highly visible and vocal presence of anti-Zionist Jews protesting against Israel’s inhumane devastation of the Gaza Strip. Now instead of the usual shorthand of antisemitism being deployed to shield Israel from criticism, they must instead ask for “balance”, they must reach past the consensus of Jewish and Palestinian voices to the extreme of Zionism, which brings to mind the great Ghassan Kanafani’s darkly wry line about the irony of the neck trying to have a conversation with the sword.
No literary festival has the obligation to platform extremists and it’s insane to suggest otherwise, just as it would be to demand that we platform the KKK, who, like Zionist white supremacists, desire an explicitly racist ethnostate. There’s no balance to racism, and anyone arguing that we need to hear more from them makes clear their own ugly stand on the subject. Let’s move on to the second central whinge, which is that all of this [gestures vaguely at opposition to genocide] stuff is so divisive, and it’s so wrong that we’re bringing it here, when it belongs over there. This is a tried, tired, line beloved of the establishment and of Zionists who want nothing more than to indulge and encourage the idea that “there” has no connection to “here”; and what’s more, that there is a permissible kill zone, a forever violence, agentless except and unless a brown or black person dares to hold a weapon in which case it’s definitely their fault. You might recall that in late October, several former Australian Prime Minister’s signed a letter allegedly written by the Zionist Federation of Australia, which had the same language, imploring Australians not to bring “ancient hatreds” here.
Much like Overington’s article, Zionists would love nothing more than for a reader to walk away thinking this is an intractable subject, a collision of racial hatreds, unreasonable, having no materiality, something you should ignore—as opposed to the ongoing conquest of Palestinian land, the destruction of their country, their villages, their history in favour of a Western-backed neo colony that routinely brutalises and murders Palestinians who are subject to apartheid. You should especially ignore that our government is avowedly, explicitly not neutral here, that it has an economic, military, and political alliance with Israel; that over 1,000 Australian-Israelis are currently overseas serving in a foreign military mass murdering Palestinians; that Australia sends military equipment to the apartheid regime, that Australia votes in line with the US and Israel at the UN in virtually every instance. This is not called divisive. The Palestinian-Australian community as well as the broader Arab/Muslim community must, apparently, accept this without dissent. Let’s be clear: what is desired by people who relentlessly advocate against “division”, no matter or despite the context that inspired it, is submission. Accept your subjugation.
This is a particularly disingenuous, duplicitous passage that once again attempts to conflate Zionism with Judaism. Overington describes accusations about Zionist lobbying as if they were without evidence, when we know for a fact that a group called “Lawyers for Israel” was involved in campaigning to have Arab-Australian author and journalist Antoinette Lattouf fired from the ABC, alongside another group of 600 Zionists called “Jewish Australian Creatives”, who did the same, and campaigned against numerous other individuals in their field that they deemed “pro-Palestinian”, many of whom were Arab or Indigenous. Later on in her article, only two paragraphs later, Overington—back on the old divisive wagon—writes “friends are losing friends and going after each other’s jobs”. It’s curiously devoid of context, but clearly, she knows full well who is going after people’s jobs, which means the above passage is a blatant deception. Both groups of Zionists who, for the record, also co-ordinated with each other and discussed ways to support Israel’s government and military—with one person advocating membership of what he claimed was an Israeli military intelligence project to no complaints from anyone else—were exposed from within by anti-Zionist Jewish members.
Earlier this morning I watched an interview of Howard Jacobson on Newsnight complaining that the BBC was showing too many images of the death and destruction in Gaza. “What you do when you do that is you take a side...it is agonising to see what is happening but there are reasons for it.” I thought that was an extraordinary admission—it reminded me of Peter Dutton saying on the record that one act of compassion could undo years of his hard work as a fascist—but here Overington outdoes him. Not only is sharing images of Palestinian suffering choosing a side, “it’s pure malice” (in the archived version I screenshot here, in print it has changed to “it’s pure hate”.) Moreover, anyone sharing such imagery, which Jacobson notes motivates a human being to want to end the murder, is doing so cynically, for “the follower counts”. God, this is all so vile, so completely reprehensible that for a minute you can almost get lost in the feeling and forget that it’s fucking bullshit.
There is no truth whatsoever to the claim that the BBC is showing “too many” bloody images—there is in fact a substantive study demonstrating irrefutably that the BBC’s pro-Israel bias goes back decades, something echoed across the Anglosphere as I wrote here—and there is equally no truth in the cynical claim about chasing clout on this subject when Palestinian accounts are routinely throttled, suspended, or banned with obvious and extensive efforts made across all social media platforms to de-amplify and censor Palestinian content. Similarly, there has been an extraordinary wave of job losses and cancellations for people in the arts and media, including most recently the acclaimed academic Ghassan Hage unfairly dismissed from his position at the Max Planck Institute after right-wing media accused him of “hatred of Israel”—far from there being any reward, there is an overt material risk to speaking against this Western-backed genocide.
With all that said, let’s sit for a moment with the claim itself, the extraordinary callousness of it, the arrogance and entitlement to complain about witnessing an image of horror (which is never only an image, but a piece of reality) instead of complaining about the horror itself, instead of doing everything in your power to stop it. There are good-faith reasons to be wary of so-called atrocity porn, and the Israeli Telegram channels with hundreds of thousands of gleeful Zionists cheering on each murder make the most obvious case that in a colonial system built on the exclusion of racialised Others, which encourages and rewards at every level hostility toward them, how much use is sharing a wound that they celebrate giving? This view caters to the murderers, and their conflict-avoidant complicit friends; I do not write for them, do not share for them. Personally, I have shared many horrors and there are many I have refused to share. I cannot claim a logic to the choice behind either. Many days I feel I am barely conscious. I don’t have a language sufficient to describe my distress, my rage, my grief. I have once again begun tearing clumps of my beard out; I sit and pull at a strand until it gives way and the brief flare of pain is enough to distract me for a second, but only a second, and then I am reaching for another; in my sleep, I’ve chewed holes in my cheek that are now inflamed; I have wept more times than I can count, because every day I see videos and images of Palestinians who look and sound like me, like my family, murdered or maimed or wailing or crying out in despair to God, to anyone, for help.
If only we had a news media that wasn’t strangled by Zionists and white supremacy, we individuals—at the behest of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip who have been reduced to the indignity of the world’s most public, livestreamed, TikTok’d genocide in an increasingly desperate attempt to break through the media blackout and gaslighting of their struggle—would not have to make this choice, or bear this hideous cost. To say nothing of the over 100 journalists who have been assassinated by Israel, or their routine, literal blackouts of Gaza in an attempt to stop these scenes from getting out. It’s still not okay. It’s not right. How can it ever be right to hold someone else’s most intimate loss in your hand, your eye, your mouth? That we do, that we are forced to in this circumstance, charges us with a sacred responsibility of care which, frankly, we continually fail. There is no right way to bear witness to genocide, but I know for damn sure that looking away is a greater wrong. And here we are at 132 days of continuous massacre, with articles in our mass media and Zionists on TV who are entirely aligned with Israel’s goal of suppression, and who, in Overington’s case, are adamantly campaigning to platform pro-Israeli voices and to punish, to smear those who are standing in the way, however slightly, of the Zionist slaughter. I have to ask, if sharing Palestinian voices in the throes of their mass murder is “pure hate”, what do you call silencing them?
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: there is no cost whatsoever to being anti-Arab. Even in the horrid middle of a holocaust that has killed/maimed 100,000 Palestinians, and displaced over 1.4m Palestinians, as well as hundreds of thousands of Lebanese people, there is no cost whatsoever to anyone advocating for their continued death and dispossession. I don’t know what else to say and I don’t have the time anymore, as my little Arab son has woken from his nap and needs my care—Lord knows he won’t get it from this world.
Salaam,
Omar
"There is no right way to bear witness to genocide, but I know for damn sure that looking away is a greater wrong." this really resonated with me. in the face of so much horror, it's hard to know what to do, how to make a difference - this was a good reminder that doing something, even if it's imperfect or incomplete, is almost always preferable to doing nothing. thank you for continuing to do this work, both in long and short form. inshallah your arab son and every other arab child will someday inherit a world less hostile to them than ours.